The State of New York is going after Internet service provider Time Warner Cable for making false claims regarding its connection speeds. The government is claiming the company conducted a systematic campaign to defraud subscribers, dating back at least as far as January 2012.
According to the lawsuit, the company’s scheme consisted of two different components. First, Time Warner advertised speeds it knew it was not capable of providing. Secondly, the company promised reliable access to online content that it could not deliver, according to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
Time Warner Cable, which has since been rebranded as Spectrum-TWC following its acquisition by Charter Communications, is the largest provider of residential Internet service in the state of New York, serving approximately 2.5 million households and generating more than $1 billion annually just from Internet services.
‘Unavoidable, Real-World Limitations’
To carry out its scheme, the company provided large numbers of subscribers with older, slower, modems and routers that were physically incapable of connecting to the Internet at the speeds the company had advertised, the complaint noted. In addition, the company deliberately chose not to make changes to its network that would have addressed the problems, according to the attorney general.
“Not only did Spectrum-TWC fail to deliver the promised Internet speeds, it repeatedly assured subscribers that they could achieve the same results with wireless as with a wired connection, even when it knew that the wireless connection suffered from unavoidable, real-world limitations,” Schneiderman said in the court filing.
Spectrum-TWC offered Internet service plans that were differentiated by the speeds they offered, with the cheaper plans starting at 2 Mbps (megabits per second ) and the more expensive plans topping out at 300 Mbps.
“Because the plans with the faster speeds were more expensive for subscribers, Spectrum-TWC tried to convince as many…